analytics

Thursday, August 18, 2011

I was thinking maybe millions of years ago there was a monkey-like creature born to a species of tree dwelling monkey-like creatures that through a genetic defect somewhere in his upper body didn't have the strength to grasp the limbs and swing around in the trees and pick his own food to eat so he was forced to live on the ground around the tree, eating whatever discarded remains of food he could find amongst all the feces. If his fellow creatures had had intelligence enough they probably would have either pitied or loathed the disabled one never realizing that the whole future of the species would come to revolve around walking around on the ground, and not living in the trees.
It seems that there have been at least a couple modern humans born with not a physical defect but a mental one where they are born without the usual survival instincts like wanting to dominate over others or even the desire to reproduce sexually. The two that come to mind are Jesus and Buddha. So they live at the base of the tree as it were by their lack of the usual instincts that all the other humans have in common living only off what's given to them by the other humans. But anyway maybe like with the monkey-like creature the lack of the ability to thrive as the others of their species do has a beneficial side-effect to the future of the evolution of the species just as not being able to swing from the trees did a long time ago.

Sunday, August 7, 2011

So if you've seen any of the Blu-Ray movies on a 1920x1080 HD display most of them look like this:

So you've got this nice 1920x1080 display but only 75 percent of it is actually showing movie, the rest is the black bars at the top and bottom. The reason for that is HD TV's are 1.77 times as wide as they are tall, and all these movies are filmed at 2.4 times as wide as they are tall, so they don't match and they have to either put the black bars around a smaller movie or stretch up and down which is even worse.
Some movies were filmed at something close to 1.77 times as wide as they are tall, but it seems to me that almost all of the movies I looked at do the black bar thing as above.
So it would be nice to have a screen that has 2.4 times as many pixels horizontally as vertically to watch all of these movies. But then I got wondering what the ideal resolution would be to capture all the detail present on the film that they recorded the movie on.
I came up with 6570x2740! This is because it turns out that 35 mm film has just about 5000 dots per square inch making up the picture... and they use about 72% of an inch to make most 2.4 aspect ratio movies (Super 32 filmstock), which comes out to 18 megapixel, which in the correct aspect ratio gives 6570x2740.
So yeah digital technology has a way to go before it can reproduce accurately what you see in the theater.